Follow up on How to prepare a session.

I did not want to derail that excellent thread asking 'what do you do to prepare for a game? Pathfinder.  My question is similar but my 'module' I want to run is not in the marketplace 'Honors Echo'. It's a series of 6 short 1 hour mission/quests for the players at lvl one.  In my case I have uploaded the maps but  and I have access to the handouts ready to give to the players. My question is this.  We are going to use the R20 dice rollers and comparing things like skills or adding/subtracting from hit points manually as well as doing the math manually for 'to hits and damage with me and the players. Do you put down your tokens for all npc/monsters with sheets attached first? Would I put them on the 'gm' layer and move them up if the players could possibly see them? This question and though prompted my other thread about linking the pathfinder SRD sheets to tokens as that would be SO much faster than manually entering all the data in each sheet.  Keith or a mod will that other thread regarding this topic be kept up? It had a poster list all the scripts he uses to prep a game and I was amazed at how cool some were. I just didn't want to lose that info.  Thanks again answering so many lame newb questions. Larsenex

We do not usually close a thread unless it is a problem that has been resolved or re-directed (discounting spam, abuse, etc.). Posts discussing general usage of Roll20 are usually allowed to die a natural death. That is, they will close automatically after a long period of inactivity. They will sink naturally after a week, I think, to make way for newer topics to be featured. The other thread should stay open.

Howdy Larsenex. First, you say you're going to do the math manually for to hits and such. Does this mean you intend to use character sheets for the rolls, or not? In one of my games, the GM does not use character sheets for himself or his NPCs. This makes placement simple; he just drags an image onto the map as a token, and rolls dice 'manually' (ie /r 1d20) In my own games, I use extensive scripting and macros, and therefore most of my important NPCs have character sheets attached. In this case, yes, it's important to have the tokens properly linked to journals. When setting up an encounter, I find it helpful to place the NPC tokens on the GM layer. But, since I have all these tokens attached to journals, I can also ad-lib encounters easily by dragging them directly from the Journal onto the map. For what you're intending, I would do this: Create a brand new game instance, importing all desired API scripts and suchlike. Use the Transmogrifier to import any wanted assets from other campaigns you've created, such as maps, monsters, etc. Create a new map page for each map or encounter. Populate them as desired with tokens and furniture etc Set up Fog of War and / or Dynamic Lighting, if desired. Make sure everything is juuust how you want it. Then... never touch it again!!!! Use this "Template" game to make a copy, and play ONLY on the copy! This way, you don't have to go back and re-do all that work, after you've played it once. And you have a way to re-play it again later, easily. Good luck!

My workflow for preparing a book is normally: Create Character Sheets for NPCs (for me I limit the NPC characters to HP, AC and XP - attacks and rolls are done by hand because otherwise I forget half of the cool stuff the enemies have) Create maps (get image, align, setup DL, place map keys, place tokens) Use the bump script to move NPCs to the GM layer for easy access later as needed Most of this results in sessions where I'm only doing one thing but extensively. So a few hours creating maps and aligning and stuff. A few hours of going through the book and finding all the monsters and creating character sheets and tokens for them. And last pulling it all together, hiding the enemies from player view, thinking about how I want to run this map with the monsters...

This is all very helpful. I think Florians response is kinda what I was planning. What is bump script? We are using the pathfinder sheets in r20 for characters. It just means I need to add more tokens to various maps.  Q> If you have a map with tokens on it for set up can you 'archive it' and pull it out to be ready to use?

The Bump script moves a token onto the GM layer and creates a token on the Token layer that is visible only to the GM. The invisible token is a proxy for the original token. If you move it, the original token moves to match. If you change its HP, the new total is reflected on the original and so on. The situation can be reversed with a second command. Very handy for invisible creatures. It is available as a one-click install.